The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

The Element shows the vital need to enhance creativity and innovation by thinking differently about human resources and imagination. It is an essential strategy for transforming education, business, and communities to meet the challenges of living and succeeding in the 21st century.

He explains that he was forced to write this book because of comment he made at a dinner engagement. That and his college professor comes out when he takes 3 chapters of good information and stretches it tediously out to create a book. He has about an hour of really fantastic information and ideas, and the rest is boring filler. I have seen him on TED, and when limited to a short period of time, he is very enlightening! For this book, I felt like I was back in the lecture hall of a mandatory class.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

This book was excellent story telling. Great intro into the question and how discoveries were made. The only down fall is you have to listen carefully to the conclusion because the answers are given very abruptly with no explanation and quickly move onto the next story. I have to rewind the book many times to actually catch what the point was.

Definitively would highly recommend listening to it, just wish the author would expand on his results.

The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, & The Paradiso

Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise-the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation. One of the greatest works in literature, Dantes story-poem is an allegory that represents mankind as it exposes itself, by its merits or demerits, to the rewards or the punishments of justice.

I listen to books while driving and found the material very dense and requiring a deep thought that I could not provide while driving. Had to rewind a lot because I would get lost in what was being described. Pam did a spectacular job reading the book and would recommend this for someone that can give the book your full attention while listening to it.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Western civilization has given us modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of law, a sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts we take for granted.

This is an excellent retelling of the Church’s forgotten history. What a refreshing change to hear about our history without all of the emphasis being exclusively on the less than perfect actions in our history. This is a good read for practicing Catholics and unbiased historian buffs. This book is not for anyone that is biased against Catholism.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

How much better would your life be if you had an army of Nobel Laureates, MacArthur ‘geniuses’ and National Medal of Science winners whispering tips in your ear about your body language, or how to resist that impulse purchase you’ll regret tomorrow, or when to sell your car - or even helping you trick your spouse into doing the dishes?

The whole book is what do you think about ____________. followed by expert X says that it is exactly what you would expect. This is the first author that did an excellent job reading his own book! I would recommend he spend more time reading books for audio than actually writing them. His ablity to read in an interesting manner, like there was at some point going to be something useful to come is what got me to listen to the entire book.

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

I had invested about 5 hours and it was an overall good book. On my way to work today it stops with an error. I delete the book and reinstall and it still will not play Chapter 4 on the Part 2 down load. So after listing to 2/3 of the book it will leave you up in the error.

Really enjoyed listening to this and the benefits of exercise. I always use the notion that exercise increased the oxygen to the brain as a motivator to make time for it. It was really interesting to hear all the other positive things that exercise does for the brain. Really great for anyone that needs additional motivation to make time to exercise.

How to Be a Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy

Nearly every man wants to be a gentleman. He may not know exactly what that means, but his true desire is to be respected and admired in the way only a gentleman can be. He wants to be prepared and confident, certain that his judgment is shrewd and his behavior appropriate. A gentleman considers the weight of his words and the impression he is leaving.

This would be good for a young listener that did not have the opportunity to learn good etiquette at home or the military. It did confirm my feelings that a vast majority of men are blatantly rude with the way they use their mobile electronic gadgets. I wish that chapter was mandatory listening for everyone that owned a cell phone.

Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric

Masters of language can turn unassuming words into phrases that are beautiful, effective, and memorable. What are the secrets of this alchemy? Part of the answer lies in rhetorical figures: practical ways of applying great aesthetic principles to a simple sentence or paragraph. Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric recovers this knowledge for our times. It amounts to a tutorial on eloquence conducted by Churchill and Lincoln, Dickens and Melville, Burke and Paine, and more than a hundred others.

Since I drive while listening, it mostly was an opportunity to hear what the author thought were remember able quotes from the 19th Century. It does categorize them all, but one would need to be listening in a situation where they could make notes for that to be practical.

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